Sunday, July 6, 2014
How To Price a Forest, and Other Economics Problems
[ed. I'm glad to see this discussion. In my career, which included conservation policy, planning, litigation, and permitting, I and other collegues frequently wrestled with essentially the same problem: how do you attach a dollar value to healthy fish and populations, natural forests, clean water, functional wetlands, pristine beaches (or the loss thereof) when there are no suitable economic models to factor in all the various benefits that those resources provide (ie., something other than simple market metrics based on the economic value of activities like logging, mining, fishing or other commercial activities). Not to mention the cost of restoring those resources should they be lost. For example, what value should we place on a killer whale that's neither consumed nor used in any commercial context (other than whale watching)? Contingent valuation is one way, but it's still a rather broad and imprecise science, prone to high levels of subjectivity. What's needed is a methodology that adequately prices all service benefits, both directly and indirectly, not only to humans but the rest of the natural environment as a whole. The flip-side of this is, of course, that not all of the world is known, or knowable... which is why scientists still have a job. But, to the extent that some of those complexities can be identified and integrated, they should be.]
Gross Domestic Product is the market value of all goods and services produced within a country in a year. It is, today, the standard snapshot of a country’s economy. But does it deserve this position? After all, it focuses on economic activity while ignoring many of the consequences of that activity, economic or otherwise.
Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta has long argued for a broader measure of a country’s wealth, and has worked on some of the most difficult challenges involved: How do you assign a dollar value to a forest? To human capital? How do humans understand long-term planning, and the effects of their actions on fellow citizens?
What should economists be most concerned with measuring?
Ultimately we social scientists should be concerned with human wellbeing, the quality of lives people lead. That sounds very metaphysical or perhaps repugnant to the hard-nosed social scientist, a policy maker. But at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about, otherwise we should just call it a halt, call our enterprise a halt. The question is not how to measure human wellbeing, because that’s an impossible thing, but whether you can find some metric which more or less approximately corresponds to it. So two things can move in the same way, even though they are not the same thing. The metric which best, and it can be proved to be so, mimics movements of human wellbeing, no matter how you define human wellbeing, is the measure of wealth. Wealth was originally a word used to define wellbeing, but that’s not how I want to use it. The result I’m quoting, the metric that you were asking for, is a value of all the assets an economy has inherited from the past. And the assets include not just buildings, machinery, roads, and equipment, the stuff that we typically think of as being capital goods, but also our health and education, which now economists all agree consist of asset, which we call the human capital. But a third category, and that’s the one we are discussing here at the Pontifical Academy, is natural capital, nature, which comes in abundance and in various forms and sizes.
Let me give you an example of why wealth, which is the value of these assets, could be going down even when GDP goes up. Imagine now, just to take a simple example, suppose you convert a huge swathe of wetlands and construct shopping malls, just as an illustration. Now, in national accounting, from which you can estimate GDP, the shopping mall will be an investment; the amount that you’ve spent will be counted as investment. But the fact that you have lost the wetlands, the republic property out there, will not be costed, it will not be seen as a depreciation of your assets, because the wetland is lost and the wetland was supplying lots and lots of services, birds and bees, and water. There’s a huge amount of services that a wetland does and I needn’t innumerate that here. But that loss will not be counted against the project.
How can economics calculate the value of nature itself?
What are the sounding blocks? The mineral subsoil resources, they are not too bad, that can be done and that has been done. We have very few estimates of stocks of fisheries, for example, so never mind valuation, governments don’t even estimate what’s out there in terms of stocks. So it’s crazy. It’s like a household. Somebody comes and says what do you own? And they won’t know whether they have pots and pans in their kitchen, they won’t know how many beds they have, they won’t know if they own the house, or perhaps have forgotten a cottage.
So national accounts are disgraceful because national governments aren’t encouraged to actually have a, if you like, an inventory of what people have at their disposal, one person or the other. Fisheries, for example—for most countries you will not be able to get estimates of the stocks of fisheries, inland fisheries or coastal fisheries. Then there is all this factory out there, forests, wetlands, mangroves, they are churning out stuff, churning out services which you’re using either in extractive form or just using as invisible inputs into production. Do we have an inventory of that? Very little. But it’s not impossible these days, because you have satellite imaging. But remember, look at the number, you have forest covering acreage or hectares or millions of hectares, but it’s not going to give you very much about the composition of forest. You might say it’s deciduous or tropical, but what’s in there, the species in there which is churning out all that stuff, most of it is not in the national accounts, not even in the most crude approximate form. So we have been able to use the timber value of forest in constructing wealth measuring using market prices, but we have not been able to devise methods to estimate the services forest provide in, say, preventing floods, all the other services that we know nature offers. So they’re all missing. So it’s very, very early days now and I don’t apologize for that. If I have to apologize, I should apologize on behalf of my profession for not having done this 30 years ago or 40 years ago, but we haven’t and we’ve started. I like to think 20, 30 years from now we’ll be in a much better position to talk about the wealth of nations.
Let me give you a simple example. It’s not a complete answer to the problem, but suppose the forest recedes from the village center because there’s over-extraction. Then to heat your home, to cook food, you have to walk a longer distance to collect firewood. Now you could as a first cut estimate the time cost, energy cost of walking, say two kilometers, three kilometers to pull back a few kilograms of firewood. So you could try and start valuing things that way.
Is the free market to blame for not assigning value to the environment? (...)
The problem as I see it is that in no society that I can think of is there an absence—and in most societies there is an awful lot of it—of unaccounted for consequences for others of the actions that we each take. When we do some damage to nature and we’re not charged for it, that’s an unaccounted consequence for others, future generations and so forth. So we have a collective action problem, that’s what it really amounts to, and that collection active problem will not disappear anytime soon; it will never disappear. And the origins of market fundamentalism, if you want an intellectual basis for it, was that there will not be any unaccounted for consequences because everything will be priced, so you’ll pay for every consequence of your action. But, of course, market fundamentalists don’t remember that theorem, so they apply it to a world in which all hell breaks loose in terms of what we call externalities, and we still say, well, the market still works. So we have a serious problem of understanding the conceptual basis for a social philosophy.
Gross Domestic Product is the market value of all goods and services produced within a country in a year. It is, today, the standard snapshot of a country’s economy. But does it deserve this position? After all, it focuses on economic activity while ignoring many of the consequences of that activity, economic or otherwise.
Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta has long argued for a broader measure of a country’s wealth, and has worked on some of the most difficult challenges involved: How do you assign a dollar value to a forest? To human capital? How do humans understand long-term planning, and the effects of their actions on fellow citizens?What should economists be most concerned with measuring?
Ultimately we social scientists should be concerned with human wellbeing, the quality of lives people lead. That sounds very metaphysical or perhaps repugnant to the hard-nosed social scientist, a policy maker. But at the end of the day that’s what it’s all about, otherwise we should just call it a halt, call our enterprise a halt. The question is not how to measure human wellbeing, because that’s an impossible thing, but whether you can find some metric which more or less approximately corresponds to it. So two things can move in the same way, even though they are not the same thing. The metric which best, and it can be proved to be so, mimics movements of human wellbeing, no matter how you define human wellbeing, is the measure of wealth. Wealth was originally a word used to define wellbeing, but that’s not how I want to use it. The result I’m quoting, the metric that you were asking for, is a value of all the assets an economy has inherited from the past. And the assets include not just buildings, machinery, roads, and equipment, the stuff that we typically think of as being capital goods, but also our health and education, which now economists all agree consist of asset, which we call the human capital. But a third category, and that’s the one we are discussing here at the Pontifical Academy, is natural capital, nature, which comes in abundance and in various forms and sizes.
Let me give you an example of why wealth, which is the value of these assets, could be going down even when GDP goes up. Imagine now, just to take a simple example, suppose you convert a huge swathe of wetlands and construct shopping malls, just as an illustration. Now, in national accounting, from which you can estimate GDP, the shopping mall will be an investment; the amount that you’ve spent will be counted as investment. But the fact that you have lost the wetlands, the republic property out there, will not be costed, it will not be seen as a depreciation of your assets, because the wetland is lost and the wetland was supplying lots and lots of services, birds and bees, and water. There’s a huge amount of services that a wetland does and I needn’t innumerate that here. But that loss will not be counted against the project.
How can economics calculate the value of nature itself?
What are the sounding blocks? The mineral subsoil resources, they are not too bad, that can be done and that has been done. We have very few estimates of stocks of fisheries, for example, so never mind valuation, governments don’t even estimate what’s out there in terms of stocks. So it’s crazy. It’s like a household. Somebody comes and says what do you own? And they won’t know whether they have pots and pans in their kitchen, they won’t know how many beds they have, they won’t know if they own the house, or perhaps have forgotten a cottage.
So national accounts are disgraceful because national governments aren’t encouraged to actually have a, if you like, an inventory of what people have at their disposal, one person or the other. Fisheries, for example—for most countries you will not be able to get estimates of the stocks of fisheries, inland fisheries or coastal fisheries. Then there is all this factory out there, forests, wetlands, mangroves, they are churning out stuff, churning out services which you’re using either in extractive form or just using as invisible inputs into production. Do we have an inventory of that? Very little. But it’s not impossible these days, because you have satellite imaging. But remember, look at the number, you have forest covering acreage or hectares or millions of hectares, but it’s not going to give you very much about the composition of forest. You might say it’s deciduous or tropical, but what’s in there, the species in there which is churning out all that stuff, most of it is not in the national accounts, not even in the most crude approximate form. So we have been able to use the timber value of forest in constructing wealth measuring using market prices, but we have not been able to devise methods to estimate the services forest provide in, say, preventing floods, all the other services that we know nature offers. So they’re all missing. So it’s very, very early days now and I don’t apologize for that. If I have to apologize, I should apologize on behalf of my profession for not having done this 30 years ago or 40 years ago, but we haven’t and we’ve started. I like to think 20, 30 years from now we’ll be in a much better position to talk about the wealth of nations.
Let me give you a simple example. It’s not a complete answer to the problem, but suppose the forest recedes from the village center because there’s over-extraction. Then to heat your home, to cook food, you have to walk a longer distance to collect firewood. Now you could as a first cut estimate the time cost, energy cost of walking, say two kilometers, three kilometers to pull back a few kilograms of firewood. So you could try and start valuing things that way.
Is the free market to blame for not assigning value to the environment? (...)
The problem as I see it is that in no society that I can think of is there an absence—and in most societies there is an awful lot of it—of unaccounted for consequences for others of the actions that we each take. When we do some damage to nature and we’re not charged for it, that’s an unaccounted consequence for others, future generations and so forth. So we have a collective action problem, that’s what it really amounts to, and that collection active problem will not disappear anytime soon; it will never disappear. And the origins of market fundamentalism, if you want an intellectual basis for it, was that there will not be any unaccounted for consequences because everything will be priced, so you’ll pay for every consequence of your action. But, of course, market fundamentalists don’t remember that theorem, so they apply it to a world in which all hell breaks loose in terms of what we call externalities, and we still say, well, the market still works. So we have a serious problem of understanding the conceptual basis for a social philosophy.
Saturday, July 5, 2014
"Do The Right Thing" at Twenty-Five
Last weekend was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Spike Lee’s 1989 Brooklyn masterpiece, “Do the Right Thing.” The movie was celebrated all over the country: in Los Angeles, with a screening at LACMA and a panel moderated by John Singleton; in the White House, where Barack and Michelle Obama recorded a video greeting to Lee, in praise of the movie they’d seen on their first date (” ‘Do the Right Thing’ still holds up a mirror to our society, and it makes us laugh and think, and challenges all of us to see ourselves in one another,” Obama said); with a party in Bed-Stuy, on the block where the film was shot, recently renamed Do the Right Thing Way, featuring Lee, Dave Chappelle, Chuck D, and thousands of fans; and at BAM, which concluded BAMcinemaFest with a sold-out screening and a panel of cast and crew members. An all-ages Brooklyn crowd showed up to the Harvey Theatre on Sunday, wearing sundresses and suits and caps and red BOYCOTT SAL’S T-shirts.
“Do the Right Thing,” about a day in the life of a Bed-Stuy neighborhood on the hottest day of the year, starts with its heroes waking up and ends the next morning, after a night that includes a fight, police brutality that ends in murder, and a riot. The movie was controversial when it came out—some publicly speculated that it would ignite violence—but, as in the character Radio Raheem’s monologue about his LOVE-HATE set of brass knuckles, love won. “Do the Right Thing” reignited interest in Malcolm X and encouraged a broader cultural reappraisal of his ideas; it inspired independent filmmakers; it made a zillion teen-agers into Public Enemy fans. But it didn’t get much love from the Academy. Though Lee was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and Danny Aiello was nominated for Best Actor, the film wasn’t nominated for Best Picture—and, in a detail that Lee found especially painful, that honor went to “Driving Miss Daisy.” (Public Enemy razzed “Daisy” in its song “Burn Hollywood Burn,” with Big Daddy Kane concluding, “So let’s make our own movies like Spike Lee.”)
That was then. In 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences co-presented theBAM and LACMA celebrations of “Do the Right Thing.” At BAM, Patrick Harrison, the Academy’s director of New York programs, told the crowd about his experience of seeing the film when it came out. “I saw it in Los Angeles, and I remember how it felt watching it,” Harrison said. “I thought, Who is this guy? Who is this director? And who is that hot chick dancing in the credits? Spike Lee has a vision and a voice. And he is absolutely not ashamed or afraid to tell you what it is. Mr. Spike Lee!”
Spike Lee came to the lectern. He wore a vaguely nautical outfit, looking like a ship’s commander: white pants, navy blazer, white shirt, white cap. His hair is graying. His facial expression hovered between above-the-fray and mildly suspicious. There was a slight commotion at stage right, and he turned toward it. “Rosie, grab a seat!” he said. Rosie Perez poked her head out of the darkness and waved. The crowd laughed. She took a seat in the front row, far off to one side. “That’s where you’re going to sit?” Lee said. “I want to thank the Academy and BAM for this screening tonight, and also for the retrospective,” he said.
Then, on a screen the size of the whole stage: Perez, in a short, tight red dress, in front of a brownstone stoop, dancing to “Fight the Power,” by Public Enemy. The room erupted in cheers, applause, joyous yelling. This also happened a few years ago at another screening of the movie at BAM, on a hot summer day, without cast and crew there—Brooklyn loves to watch Rosie Perez dance. It’s a knockout sequence: brutal, expressive, vital, the colors hot, then cool, sounds and visuals making fighting and beauty harmonize. Perez is shown dancing at night, in a blue bodysuit and a leather jacket, the sound of a police helicopter overhead; in a boxer’s gloves and a sports bra, shorts, and boxing gloves, in front of a wall of graffiti.
Got to give us what we want
Got to give us what we need
Our freedom of speech is freedom or death
We’ve got to fight the powers that be
Perez pops her chest in and out, arms raised in fists. She looks like she’s working toward something. She purses her lips and looks angry, sensual, exhausted, unwilling to quit. She dances to the whole song, for nearly four minutes. “Do the Right Thing” is the perfect delivery system for “Fight the Power,” perhaps the most danceable protest song ever. Throughout the film, it keeps reasserting itself, coming from the giant boom box of Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), a tall, broad-shouldered guy with a flattop, a focussed, serious expression, and a BED-STUY DO OR DIE T-shirt. “Fight the Power” sounds energized, aggressive, and now. (Even now.)
The music perfectly reflects the film’s power: Public Enemy young, smart, confrontational; Bill Lee’s orchestral score classic, beautiful, narrative, Hollywood. Lee is a master at revealing all the little interactions in a New York neighborhood: among three guys shooting the shit all day long (“If this heat wave continues, it’s going to melt the polar ice caps and the whole wide world,” one says), between the pizzeria owner, Sal (Aiello), and Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), who sweeps his sidewalk when Sal’s angry, racist son (John Turturro) doesn’t want to do it; between teens messing around with a fire hydrant and a tough guy who hollers at them not to douse his convertible as he drives by; between Clifton (John Savage), a white brownstoner in a Larry Bird jersey, and Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), whose Jordans he scuffs. The movie is a touch poetic, heightened by the hilarity of the script and the beauty of the cinematography, by Ernest Dickerson, the colorful production design, by Wynn Thomas, and the eye-popping costume design, by Ruth E. Carter. You might cry when Perez dances, and you might cry toward the end, when Sal and Radio Raheem tumble onto the sidewalk, hands at each other’s throats. When I saw it as a teen-ager in 1989, in a theatre in Hartford, I was shattered at the end, seeing the image of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., come onscreen, and reading their quotations about violence and nonviolence. Now, at BAM, I was most struck by the humanness of the story: the way we assert and defend ourselves, the way we see people and don’t, the way we respect people and don’t; the way we do things we regret when we’re angry or fed up or even too hot. I’d love to know what Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson said to each other when the lights came on in the theatre in Chicago.
“Do the Right Thing,” about a day in the life of a Bed-Stuy neighborhood on the hottest day of the year, starts with its heroes waking up and ends the next morning, after a night that includes a fight, police brutality that ends in murder, and a riot. The movie was controversial when it came out—some publicly speculated that it would ignite violence—but, as in the character Radio Raheem’s monologue about his LOVE-HATE set of brass knuckles, love won. “Do the Right Thing” reignited interest in Malcolm X and encouraged a broader cultural reappraisal of his ideas; it inspired independent filmmakers; it made a zillion teen-agers into Public Enemy fans. But it didn’t get much love from the Academy. Though Lee was nominated for an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and Danny Aiello was nominated for Best Actor, the film wasn’t nominated for Best Picture—and, in a detail that Lee found especially painful, that honor went to “Driving Miss Daisy.” (Public Enemy razzed “Daisy” in its song “Burn Hollywood Burn,” with Big Daddy Kane concluding, “So let’s make our own movies like Spike Lee.”)That was then. In 2014, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences co-presented theBAM and LACMA celebrations of “Do the Right Thing.” At BAM, Patrick Harrison, the Academy’s director of New York programs, told the crowd about his experience of seeing the film when it came out. “I saw it in Los Angeles, and I remember how it felt watching it,” Harrison said. “I thought, Who is this guy? Who is this director? And who is that hot chick dancing in the credits? Spike Lee has a vision and a voice. And he is absolutely not ashamed or afraid to tell you what it is. Mr. Spike Lee!”
Spike Lee came to the lectern. He wore a vaguely nautical outfit, looking like a ship’s commander: white pants, navy blazer, white shirt, white cap. His hair is graying. His facial expression hovered between above-the-fray and mildly suspicious. There was a slight commotion at stage right, and he turned toward it. “Rosie, grab a seat!” he said. Rosie Perez poked her head out of the darkness and waved. The crowd laughed. She took a seat in the front row, far off to one side. “That’s where you’re going to sit?” Lee said. “I want to thank the Academy and BAM for this screening tonight, and also for the retrospective,” he said.
Then, on a screen the size of the whole stage: Perez, in a short, tight red dress, in front of a brownstone stoop, dancing to “Fight the Power,” by Public Enemy. The room erupted in cheers, applause, joyous yelling. This also happened a few years ago at another screening of the movie at BAM, on a hot summer day, without cast and crew there—Brooklyn loves to watch Rosie Perez dance. It’s a knockout sequence: brutal, expressive, vital, the colors hot, then cool, sounds and visuals making fighting and beauty harmonize. Perez is shown dancing at night, in a blue bodysuit and a leather jacket, the sound of a police helicopter overhead; in a boxer’s gloves and a sports bra, shorts, and boxing gloves, in front of a wall of graffiti.
Got to give us what we want
Got to give us what we need
Our freedom of speech is freedom or death
We’ve got to fight the powers that be
Perez pops her chest in and out, arms raised in fists. She looks like she’s working toward something. She purses her lips and looks angry, sensual, exhausted, unwilling to quit. She dances to the whole song, for nearly four minutes. “Do the Right Thing” is the perfect delivery system for “Fight the Power,” perhaps the most danceable protest song ever. Throughout the film, it keeps reasserting itself, coming from the giant boom box of Radio Raheem (Bill Nunn), a tall, broad-shouldered guy with a flattop, a focussed, serious expression, and a BED-STUY DO OR DIE T-shirt. “Fight the Power” sounds energized, aggressive, and now. (Even now.)
The music perfectly reflects the film’s power: Public Enemy young, smart, confrontational; Bill Lee’s orchestral score classic, beautiful, narrative, Hollywood. Lee is a master at revealing all the little interactions in a New York neighborhood: among three guys shooting the shit all day long (“If this heat wave continues, it’s going to melt the polar ice caps and the whole wide world,” one says), between the pizzeria owner, Sal (Aiello), and Da Mayor (Ossie Davis), who sweeps his sidewalk when Sal’s angry, racist son (John Turturro) doesn’t want to do it; between teens messing around with a fire hydrant and a tough guy who hollers at them not to douse his convertible as he drives by; between Clifton (John Savage), a white brownstoner in a Larry Bird jersey, and Buggin’ Out (Giancarlo Esposito), whose Jordans he scuffs. The movie is a touch poetic, heightened by the hilarity of the script and the beauty of the cinematography, by Ernest Dickerson, the colorful production design, by Wynn Thomas, and the eye-popping costume design, by Ruth E. Carter. You might cry when Perez dances, and you might cry toward the end, when Sal and Radio Raheem tumble onto the sidewalk, hands at each other’s throats. When I saw it as a teen-ager in 1989, in a theatre in Hartford, I was shattered at the end, seeing the image of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr., come onscreen, and reading their quotations about violence and nonviolence. Now, at BAM, I was most struck by the humanness of the story: the way we assert and defend ourselves, the way we see people and don’t, the way we respect people and don’t; the way we do things we regret when we’re angry or fed up or even too hot. I’d love to know what Barack Obama and Michelle Robinson said to each other when the lights came on in the theatre in Chicago.
by Sarah Larson, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Do The Right Thing
Exploring Lanai, Hawaii, Rough Roads to Resorts
The aridness of Lanai, in dry contrast to the lushness of Kauai or Maui, may be stark and startling, but it suggests the peculiar history and charms of this small island west of Maui. These were once fields of pineapples, and this was known as Pineapple Island; the Dole Company owned 98 percent of Lanai for nearly 100 years before moving its plantations to less expensive shores. David Murdock, a billionaire entrepreneur, took it over in 1985 and moved to put it on the luxury tourism map, building two high-end resorts, one by Manele Bay and another 10 miles away, overlooking the only town, Lanai City. It was a tough sell. When Larry Ellison, a founder of Oracle, bought Lanai from a discouraged Mr. Murdock in 2012, he was bursting with ideas about how to make this island finally work — starting with multimillion-dollar renovations at the resorts, but including the notion of transforming Lanai into an international model of an environmentally sustainable community.
Long before Mr. Ellison came on the scene, a devoted sort of traveler has been drawn to Lanai, in search of a rough and rural Hawaii that once was — before the walls of beach resorts, condominiums, high-end restaurants and beaches crawling with swimmers, surfers and snorkelers. After coming to Lanai over the last three years, I, too, embraced its wind-swept barrenness and isolation, the harsh challenges in traveling deeply rutted and dusty roads to find its beaches, trails and ruins, even the relative lack of things to do after sundown. Still, a return trip in June made clear that things are changing. Mr. Ellison’s presence can be felt almost everywhere: the construction at the resorts; the spiffing-up of Lanai City, the onetime plantation town; the talk of long-term plans for desalination plants; agriculture; middle-class housing; and even a college campus and a film festival. Everyone is watching as the billionaire visionary seeks to change Lanai to his liking while, presumably, remaining faithful to the idea of it as the place to find Hawaii as it once was.From the outset, I should stress that the way Hawaii once was is not for everyone. There are more restaurants, bars, hotels and places to surf, swim and snorkel in Maui and the Big Island. (Those islands are also easier on your knees, tires and wallet.) As high-end as the two Four Seasons resorts on Lanai aspire to be — and these days, Mr. Ellison’s crews are bang-bang-banging away, racing to transform them into the kind of destination that people will think nothing of spending $650 a night to enjoy — the St. Regis Princeville Resort in Kauai, to name one of many impressive options spread across the islands, matches it in setting and grandeur without quite the forced isolation.
Being a tourist on Lanai can be as exhausting as it is exhilarating. There is just one gas station on all of Lanai’s 141 square miles, and not a single traffic light. The population is just over 3,000, most clustered in the plantation homes that make up Lanai City. Three roads are paved; the island is crisscrossed with a largely unmapped network of red-dirt roads — impossibly rutted and rough, throwing up clouds of dust that provide a thick coat over wheels, fenders, clothes and shoes.
Still with me? Good.
There are two ways to experience Lanai, and visitors who come here can initially be divided into two groups: Those who rent jeeps, and those who don’t. It is entirely possible to fly in, or jump on the 45-minute intoxicatingly beautiful ferry trip from Maui, to the waiting luxury Mercedes-Benz minibuses to the Four Seasons Hotel at Manele Bay or the Lodge at Koele and disappear into these islands-within-an-island. An adventure would consist of braving a trip from one Four Seasons Resort to the other Four Seasons resort.
Alternately, you can get a room at the charming Hotel Lanai, snag a Jeep, throw some towels, sturdy shoes and walking sticks into the back seat and set out to explore one of the last truly undeveloped Hawaiian islands.
It’s actually not a choice. Do both.
by Adam Nagourney, NY Times | Read more:
Images: Kahekili's Leap and Club Lanai, markk
Friday, July 4, 2014
The Fear Factor
In 2010, a respected international team published a study finding that old age generally arrives later than the dependency ratio assumes—if old age is defined as the point at which older people need permanent care, that is, when they are disabled. The demographers Warren C. Sanderson and Sergei Scherbov wrote in Science magazine, “Alternative measures that account for life-expectancy changes”—improvements in health and longevity—“show slower rates of aging than their conventional counterparts,” based on “fixed chronological ages.”
They wrote that chronological age is less useful than life expectancies in predicting national health costs, because “most of those costs occur in the last few years of life.” Sanderson and Scherbov developed a measure they called the adult disability dependency ratio, defined as the number of adults 20 and over with disabilities, divided by the number of adults 20 and over without them. In the United States, this measure will likely remain flat for the next generation, meaning that the cost of caring for the disabled is not likely to skyrocket as a result of a major increase in the number of disabled people.
John Shoven, a Stanford economist, takes that idea a step further: in a scholarly paper called “New Age Thinking,” he argues that age should be defined differently from the universal convention of years since birth. “The measurement of age with different measures is not like choosing between measuring temperature on a Fahrenheit or Centigrade scale,” he warned. The reason to change how age is measured is that the connection between the universal definition of age and the alternatives he proposes is constantly changing. Because of advances in nutrition, sanitation, and other factors, as well as health care, someone who has lived a long time is no longer as old as his or her numerical age once indicated.
A man born in 1900 was expected to live until he was 51 ½ and had less than a 50 percent chance of living until he reached 65. A man born in 2000 is expected to live until he is 80 and has an 86 percent chance of reaching 65. That dramatic advance in longevity indicates that knowing how many years a person has been alive tells only so much about the person’s risk of dying.
Shoven proposes that instead of measuring age backward, as in years since birth, we measure it forward, as in years until projected death. One option is to measure age by mortality risk. A 51-year-old man in 1970 had the same mortality risk (a one percent chance that he would die) as a 58-year-old man in 2000: in one generation, longevity advanced by seven years for that level of risk. Another option is to measure age by remaining life expectancy, a more accessible measure because it is computed in years rather than as a percentage. In 1900, a man who reached 65 had a remaining life expectancy of about 13 years. In 2000, a man who reached 65 had a life expectancy of about 21 years.
Measuring backward yields starkly different results from measuring forward. “Consider two alternative definitions of who is elderly in the population,” Shoven writes, “those who are currently 65 or older and those who have a mortality rate of 1.5 percent or worse.” In 2007, when he wrote this paper, the two definitions were equal: the average mortality rate was 1.5 percent or worse for 65-year-olds. According to the U.S. Census, the population of those who are 65 or older will increase from about 12.5 percent of the population in 2035 to about 20.5 percent in 2050. But “the percent of the population with mortality risks higher than 1.5 percent (currently also 12.5 percent of the population) never gets above 16.5 percent,” because of what James Fries of the Stanford School of Medicine called “the compression of morbidity”—the tendency of illnesses to occur during a short period before death if the first serious illness can be postponed. That number “is projected to be just slightly below 15 percent and declining by 2050.”
By the conventional measure of years since birth, the population considered elderly is expected to grow by 64 percent. By Shoven’s measure, on the other hand, it is expected to grow by just 32 percent. “The point,” he says, “is the great aging of our society is partly a straightforward consequence of how we measure age.”
To Laura Carstensen, a psychologist who directs the Stanford Center on Longevity, the striking advance in lifespan requires “us to answer a uniquely twenty-first-century question: What are we going to do with super-sized lives?” In her book A Long Bright Future, she envisions a transformation in American culture and society that would “expand youth and middle age” as well as old age, in “a new model for longer life” that would “harness the best of each stage at its natural peak.”
She proposes that young adults should ease into the work force, “working fewer hours during the years that they’re caring for young children, completing their educations, and trying to find the right careers.” Around 40, full-time work life would begin, when people “have developed the emotional stability that guides them as leaders.” Older workers, rather than “vaulting into full retirement on their sixty-fifth birthdays,” would continue to work for more years but for fewer hours, and retirement “could be the pinnacle of life, rather than its ‘leftovers.’ ”
Carstensen’s proposal rests on findings in her work about the capabilities of older workers. She learned that they are generally more stable emotionally than younger workers and better at dealing with stress, and that while younger workers, by and large, pick up new information faster, older workers often have wider knowledge and more expertise. One important study by a group at the Rush University Medical Center casts doubt even on the cognitive advantage of younger workers. The decline in cognitive processing speed found in older workers turns out to be negligible when people who later developed Alzheimer’s disease are removed from the group studied. That would include one out of every nine people who are 65 and over.
Carstensen and others are building on the work of the late Robert N. Butler, a psychiatrist whose biographer described him as a “visionary of healthy aging.” The founding director of the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health, Butler believed that the extension of American lives—especially the extension of the healthy years—requires new thinking about some of America’s basic institutions. “Many of our economic, political, ethical, health, and other institutions, such as education and work life, have been rendered obsolete by the added years of life for so many citizens,” Butler wrote in his 2008 book, The Longevity Revolution.
Butler was a realist about the discrimination that older Americans can face in addition to declines in physical capability, health, and cognitive ability. He coined the term ageism for this form of discrimination and catalogued how it can manifest itself in problems finding appropriate work, housing, transportation, and satisfying other basic needs. But Butler was an optimist, convinced that many healthy older Americans represent not a liability but a great asset of experience, skill, and drive that the country should learn how to exploit.
In a nation whose motto is E pluribus unum, a fundamental disagreement about social policy in recent decades has been about how policymakers should reinforce the mutual support called for in the motto. They could emphasize the value of older Americans working on behalf of children in education, for example, and younger Americans supporting older ones who need help. Or policymakers could strive to ease the allegedly large conflict between generations over the allocation of scarce resources. The shorthand for this difference of opinion in our splintered political culture is “warfare” versus “interdependence” between the boomer generation and the generations that follow. Our emphasis should be on generational interdependence.
They wrote that chronological age is less useful than life expectancies in predicting national health costs, because “most of those costs occur in the last few years of life.” Sanderson and Scherbov developed a measure they called the adult disability dependency ratio, defined as the number of adults 20 and over with disabilities, divided by the number of adults 20 and over without them. In the United States, this measure will likely remain flat for the next generation, meaning that the cost of caring for the disabled is not likely to skyrocket as a result of a major increase in the number of disabled people.John Shoven, a Stanford economist, takes that idea a step further: in a scholarly paper called “New Age Thinking,” he argues that age should be defined differently from the universal convention of years since birth. “The measurement of age with different measures is not like choosing between measuring temperature on a Fahrenheit or Centigrade scale,” he warned. The reason to change how age is measured is that the connection between the universal definition of age and the alternatives he proposes is constantly changing. Because of advances in nutrition, sanitation, and other factors, as well as health care, someone who has lived a long time is no longer as old as his or her numerical age once indicated.
A man born in 1900 was expected to live until he was 51 ½ and had less than a 50 percent chance of living until he reached 65. A man born in 2000 is expected to live until he is 80 and has an 86 percent chance of reaching 65. That dramatic advance in longevity indicates that knowing how many years a person has been alive tells only so much about the person’s risk of dying.
Shoven proposes that instead of measuring age backward, as in years since birth, we measure it forward, as in years until projected death. One option is to measure age by mortality risk. A 51-year-old man in 1970 had the same mortality risk (a one percent chance that he would die) as a 58-year-old man in 2000: in one generation, longevity advanced by seven years for that level of risk. Another option is to measure age by remaining life expectancy, a more accessible measure because it is computed in years rather than as a percentage. In 1900, a man who reached 65 had a remaining life expectancy of about 13 years. In 2000, a man who reached 65 had a life expectancy of about 21 years.
Measuring backward yields starkly different results from measuring forward. “Consider two alternative definitions of who is elderly in the population,” Shoven writes, “those who are currently 65 or older and those who have a mortality rate of 1.5 percent or worse.” In 2007, when he wrote this paper, the two definitions were equal: the average mortality rate was 1.5 percent or worse for 65-year-olds. According to the U.S. Census, the population of those who are 65 or older will increase from about 12.5 percent of the population in 2035 to about 20.5 percent in 2050. But “the percent of the population with mortality risks higher than 1.5 percent (currently also 12.5 percent of the population) never gets above 16.5 percent,” because of what James Fries of the Stanford School of Medicine called “the compression of morbidity”—the tendency of illnesses to occur during a short period before death if the first serious illness can be postponed. That number “is projected to be just slightly below 15 percent and declining by 2050.”
By the conventional measure of years since birth, the population considered elderly is expected to grow by 64 percent. By Shoven’s measure, on the other hand, it is expected to grow by just 32 percent. “The point,” he says, “is the great aging of our society is partly a straightforward consequence of how we measure age.”
To Laura Carstensen, a psychologist who directs the Stanford Center on Longevity, the striking advance in lifespan requires “us to answer a uniquely twenty-first-century question: What are we going to do with super-sized lives?” In her book A Long Bright Future, she envisions a transformation in American culture and society that would “expand youth and middle age” as well as old age, in “a new model for longer life” that would “harness the best of each stage at its natural peak.”
She proposes that young adults should ease into the work force, “working fewer hours during the years that they’re caring for young children, completing their educations, and trying to find the right careers.” Around 40, full-time work life would begin, when people “have developed the emotional stability that guides them as leaders.” Older workers, rather than “vaulting into full retirement on their sixty-fifth birthdays,” would continue to work for more years but for fewer hours, and retirement “could be the pinnacle of life, rather than its ‘leftovers.’ ”
Carstensen’s proposal rests on findings in her work about the capabilities of older workers. She learned that they are generally more stable emotionally than younger workers and better at dealing with stress, and that while younger workers, by and large, pick up new information faster, older workers often have wider knowledge and more expertise. One important study by a group at the Rush University Medical Center casts doubt even on the cognitive advantage of younger workers. The decline in cognitive processing speed found in older workers turns out to be negligible when people who later developed Alzheimer’s disease are removed from the group studied. That would include one out of every nine people who are 65 and over.
Carstensen and others are building on the work of the late Robert N. Butler, a psychiatrist whose biographer described him as a “visionary of healthy aging.” The founding director of the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health, Butler believed that the extension of American lives—especially the extension of the healthy years—requires new thinking about some of America’s basic institutions. “Many of our economic, political, ethical, health, and other institutions, such as education and work life, have been rendered obsolete by the added years of life for so many citizens,” Butler wrote in his 2008 book, The Longevity Revolution.
Butler was a realist about the discrimination that older Americans can face in addition to declines in physical capability, health, and cognitive ability. He coined the term ageism for this form of discrimination and catalogued how it can manifest itself in problems finding appropriate work, housing, transportation, and satisfying other basic needs. But Butler was an optimist, convinced that many healthy older Americans represent not a liability but a great asset of experience, skill, and drive that the country should learn how to exploit.
In a nation whose motto is E pluribus unum, a fundamental disagreement about social policy in recent decades has been about how policymakers should reinforce the mutual support called for in the motto. They could emphasize the value of older Americans working on behalf of children in education, for example, and younger Americans supporting older ones who need help. Or policymakers could strive to ease the allegedly large conflict between generations over the allocation of scarce resources. The shorthand for this difference of opinion in our splintered political culture is “warfare” versus “interdependence” between the boomer generation and the generations that follow. Our emphasis should be on generational interdependence.
by Lincoln Caplan, American Scholar | Read more:
Image: David Herbick
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Out West, There’s a Showdown Between Green Chili And Kalua Pig
This is review No. 8 of 16 in the first round of our competition. Each review will compare four burritos, with my favorite advancing to Round 2.
I’m rating the burritos on five attributes, each worth 20 points. The scoring will resemble a standard bell curve; the very highest totals will be reserved for exceptional burritos, while a score of 60 is still a burrito I would want to eat regularly.
The final competition in the West is a face-off among restaurants from the far corners of the region, from Kalua pig in Hawaii to green chili and pork in El Paso, Texas.
The final competition in the West is a face-off among restaurants from the far corners of the region, from Kalua pig in Hawaii to green chili and pork in El Paso, Texas.
Kono's, Haleiwa, Hawaii
I landed at the airport in Honolulu, my first time in Hawaii, and headed straight to the marketplace in historic downtown Haleiwa on the North Shore of Oahu island. Tchotchkes at the airport’s shops spoke the joys of “island time,” as had the websites for hotels and rentals I’d seen before I came. Although I was in a hurry, just 36 hours on the island, I was determined to slow those hours down and make the most of them. I broke out of the oppressive Honolulu traffic and made it to Haleiwa. The air was warm and thick with humidity, slowing me down already.
Inside Kono’s, surfboards from the young all-stars of the North shore (John John Florence, Kiron Jabour, Eli Olson) hang on the wall, with handwritten dedications to the restaurant and its stellar burritos. A giant blackboard behind the counter describes the menu, and a pulley system takes order tickets from the counter to the kitchen.
I ordered a lemonade and a Pig Bomber. The lemon juicer was broken, so there was no lemonade. The receipt machine was broken, too, though I was probably the only patron in weeks to request a receipt. Kono’s was out of iced coffee as well, so I settled on a milkshake, which came in tropical fruit flavors and the standard chocolate, vanilla and peanut butter. I took a seat outside and waited. When a voice on the 1950s drive-in-style microphone called out for “the person who ordered a shake a few minutes ago,” I went inside to find out the restaurant was also out of ice cream.
It seemed a small price to pay for island life. Who was I to be frustrated? I was there for the burrito, which made it to my picnic table without incident.
The Pig Bomber was filled with burgundy shreds of kalua pig, caramelized onions, sweet and tangy guava barbecue sauce, jack and cheddar cheese, and plain rice. Unfortunately the distribution of ingredients was a bit erratic, meaning too many bites of plain rice, but the combination of flavors was magical where the fat, round rice kernels had soaked up the bright guava and kalua juices. After nearly two weeks in the land of expertly handmade tortillas, the run-of-the-mill tortillas at Kono’s were clearly utilitarian, and although they did little to enhance the burrito’s flavor, they were better than most grocery-store varieties. The salty shreds of kalua pig were offset by the sweetness of the onions and guava barbecue; even now, back on the mainland, I can close my eyes and taste that flavor combination.
I ate at Kono’s again the next morning, to try a breakfast burrito, before returning to Honolulu to catch my flight. The Breakfast Bombers are stuffed with gobs of fluffy egg, kalua pig and heavily spiced potato; I added avocado for good measure. I can understand why it’s a favorite among surfers in need of a heavy dose of calories, but it’s also delicious. (...)
Rancho Bravo, Seatlle, Washington
Like so many, it started as a taco truck. Rancho Bravo then added a brick-and-mortar spot in downtown Seattle, taking over where a fast-food chain had been. Employees use the old drive-thru, indicated by the wraparound driveway and remnant “Clearance 8’ 10” ” sign, for parking. For several blocks in either direction, hip bars and coffee shops line the street on one side and a lush park sits on the other; Rancho Bravo seems to be from a different era. There was no sign anywhere on the building indicating the occupant, but judging by the crowd, its location is not a secret.
The Pacific Northwest knows Asian flavors almost the way the Southwest knows Mexican ones. It seems like there’s bà hn mà on every block, pho on every corner and hand-pulled Chinese noodles available 24 hours a day. It’s not the same with good Mexican food, and our Burrito Selection Committee struggled while choosing a burrito in Oregon or Washington. Online sources varied wildly: Some lauded Rancho Bravo as the real deal in an area with few options, but others begrudgingly accepted it as good enough only to sop up the alcohol at the end of a long night. I had no idea what to expect.
I placed my order and walked toward the end of the counter to pick out salsas. Before I had time to make sense of the four on offer (two red, two green — a hot and mild version for each color), my order was ready. It couldn’t have been more than 30 seconds – impressive, though slightly disconcerting. I got a tiny paper cup of each salsa and took a seat at a table outside to catch the last sunbeams before the night cold set in.
The Bravo Burrito comes with sour cream, grilled onion, cheese, rice, pinto beans, cilantro and tomato. I ordered it with al pastor, which was cut in tiny little cubes and charred all around. It was also salty, and I’m not sure where the pineapple in the marinade disappeared to, but I washed each bite down with naturally sweet agua fresca de piña, so I didn’t miss it much. The tortilla was griddled, but the burrito started to fall apart before I was halfway through. The grilled onions were brown and flavorful, the pintos flush with juice but heavy on the salt and a little mushy.
Inside Kono’s, surfboards from the young all-stars of the North shore (John John Florence, Kiron Jabour, Eli Olson) hang on the wall, with handwritten dedications to the restaurant and its stellar burritos. A giant blackboard behind the counter describes the menu, and a pulley system takes order tickets from the counter to the kitchen.
I ordered a lemonade and a Pig Bomber. The lemon juicer was broken, so there was no lemonade. The receipt machine was broken, too, though I was probably the only patron in weeks to request a receipt. Kono’s was out of iced coffee as well, so I settled on a milkshake, which came in tropical fruit flavors and the standard chocolate, vanilla and peanut butter. I took a seat outside and waited. When a voice on the 1950s drive-in-style microphone called out for “the person who ordered a shake a few minutes ago,” I went inside to find out the restaurant was also out of ice cream.It seemed a small price to pay for island life. Who was I to be frustrated? I was there for the burrito, which made it to my picnic table without incident.
The Pig Bomber was filled with burgundy shreds of kalua pig, caramelized onions, sweet and tangy guava barbecue sauce, jack and cheddar cheese, and plain rice. Unfortunately the distribution of ingredients was a bit erratic, meaning too many bites of plain rice, but the combination of flavors was magical where the fat, round rice kernels had soaked up the bright guava and kalua juices. After nearly two weeks in the land of expertly handmade tortillas, the run-of-the-mill tortillas at Kono’s were clearly utilitarian, and although they did little to enhance the burrito’s flavor, they were better than most grocery-store varieties. The salty shreds of kalua pig were offset by the sweetness of the onions and guava barbecue; even now, back on the mainland, I can close my eyes and taste that flavor combination.
I ate at Kono’s again the next morning, to try a breakfast burrito, before returning to Honolulu to catch my flight. The Breakfast Bombers are stuffed with gobs of fluffy egg, kalua pig and heavily spiced potato; I added avocado for good measure. I can understand why it’s a favorite among surfers in need of a heavy dose of calories, but it’s also delicious. (...)
Rancho Bravo, Seatlle, Washington
Like so many, it started as a taco truck. Rancho Bravo then added a brick-and-mortar spot in downtown Seattle, taking over where a fast-food chain had been. Employees use the old drive-thru, indicated by the wraparound driveway and remnant “Clearance 8’ 10” ” sign, for parking. For several blocks in either direction, hip bars and coffee shops line the street on one side and a lush park sits on the other; Rancho Bravo seems to be from a different era. There was no sign anywhere on the building indicating the occupant, but judging by the crowd, its location is not a secret.
The Pacific Northwest knows Asian flavors almost the way the Southwest knows Mexican ones. It seems like there’s bà hn mà on every block, pho on every corner and hand-pulled Chinese noodles available 24 hours a day. It’s not the same with good Mexican food, and our Burrito Selection Committee struggled while choosing a burrito in Oregon or Washington. Online sources varied wildly: Some lauded Rancho Bravo as the real deal in an area with few options, but others begrudgingly accepted it as good enough only to sop up the alcohol at the end of a long night. I had no idea what to expect.I placed my order and walked toward the end of the counter to pick out salsas. Before I had time to make sense of the four on offer (two red, two green — a hot and mild version for each color), my order was ready. It couldn’t have been more than 30 seconds – impressive, though slightly disconcerting. I got a tiny paper cup of each salsa and took a seat at a table outside to catch the last sunbeams before the night cold set in.
The Bravo Burrito comes with sour cream, grilled onion, cheese, rice, pinto beans, cilantro and tomato. I ordered it with al pastor, which was cut in tiny little cubes and charred all around. It was also salty, and I’m not sure where the pineapple in the marinade disappeared to, but I washed each bite down with naturally sweet agua fresca de piña, so I didn’t miss it much. The tortilla was griddled, but the burrito started to fall apart before I was halfway through. The grilled onions were brown and flavorful, the pintos flush with juice but heavy on the salt and a little mushy.
by Anna Maria Barry-Jester, FiveThirtyEight | Read more:
Images: uncredited
Machines v. Lawyers
Law schools are in crisis, facing their most substantial decline in enrollment in decades, if not in the history of legal education. Applications have fallen over 40 percent since 2004. The legal workplace is troubled, too. Benjamin Barton, of the University of Tennessee College of Law, has shown that attorneys in “small law,” such as solo practitioners, have been hurting for a decade. Attorney job growth has been flat; partner incomes at large firms have recently recovered from the economic downturn, but the going rate for associates, even at the best firms, has stagnated since 2007.
Some observers, not implausibly, blame the recession for these developments. But the plight of legal education and of the attorney workplace is also a harbinger of a looming transformation in the legal profession. Law is, in effect, an information technology—a code that regulates social life. And as the machinery of information technology grows exponentially in power, the legal profession faces a great disruption not unlike that already experienced by journalism, which has seen employment drop by about a third and the market value of newspapers devastated. The effects on law will take longer to play themselves out, but they will likely be even greater because of the central role that lawyers play in public life.
The growing role of machine intelligence will create new competition in the legal profession and reduce the incomes of many lawyers. The job category that the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “other legal services”—which includes the use of technology to help perform legal tasks—has already been surging, over 7 percent per year from 1999 to 2010. As a consequence, the law-school crisis will deepen, forcing some schools to close and others to reduce tuitions. While lawyers and law professors may mourn the loss of more lucrative professional opportunities, consumers of modest means will enjoy access to previously cost-prohibitive services.
A decline in the clout of law schools and lawyers could have potentially broader political effects. For the last half-century, many law professors and lawyers have pressed for more government intervention in the economy. This isn’t surprising. Lawyers in the modern regulatory state reap rewards from big government because their expertise is needed to understand and comply with (or exploit) complicated and ever-changing rules. In contrast, the entrepreneurs and innovators driving our computational revolution benefit more from a stable regulatory regime and limited government. As they replace lawyers in influence, they’re likely to shape a politics more friendly to markets and less so to regulation. (...)
Five key areas of law now face encroachment by this machine intelligence. Some invasions are imminent, and others more distant but no less likely.
Some observers, not implausibly, blame the recession for these developments. But the plight of legal education and of the attorney workplace is also a harbinger of a looming transformation in the legal profession. Law is, in effect, an information technology—a code that regulates social life. And as the machinery of information technology grows exponentially in power, the legal profession faces a great disruption not unlike that already experienced by journalism, which has seen employment drop by about a third and the market value of newspapers devastated. The effects on law will take longer to play themselves out, but they will likely be even greater because of the central role that lawyers play in public life.The growing role of machine intelligence will create new competition in the legal profession and reduce the incomes of many lawyers. The job category that the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls “other legal services”—which includes the use of technology to help perform legal tasks—has already been surging, over 7 percent per year from 1999 to 2010. As a consequence, the law-school crisis will deepen, forcing some schools to close and others to reduce tuitions. While lawyers and law professors may mourn the loss of more lucrative professional opportunities, consumers of modest means will enjoy access to previously cost-prohibitive services.
A decline in the clout of law schools and lawyers could have potentially broader political effects. For the last half-century, many law professors and lawyers have pressed for more government intervention in the economy. This isn’t surprising. Lawyers in the modern regulatory state reap rewards from big government because their expertise is needed to understand and comply with (or exploit) complicated and ever-changing rules. In contrast, the entrepreneurs and innovators driving our computational revolution benefit more from a stable regulatory regime and limited government. As they replace lawyers in influence, they’re likely to shape a politics more friendly to markets and less so to regulation. (...)
Five key areas of law now face encroachment by this machine intelligence. Some invasions are imminent, and others more distant but no less likely.
by John O. McGinnis, City Journal | Read more:
Image: Arnold Roth
This Fish Could Save the Caribbean Coral Reefs
The bad news is that coral reefs are declining at a breakneck pace. Only a sixth of the structure’s original range has survived the last few decades, and it may take only 20 years to edge out the remaining reefs.
The good news is that there may be a very simple answer: don’t kill parrotfish. The study found that these keystone herbivores disproportionately contribute to the health of their host reefs by feeding on coral-suffocating algae.
The IUCN cited the declining parrotfish population, as well as other algae grazers like sea urchins, as the key driver behind reef collapse. It even trumps the negative effects of climate change on tropical reefs, though that may change over the coming decades.
by Becky Ferreira, Motherboard | Read more:
Image: Phil's 1stPix
Rude Hooker
From the movie High Road (2011)
[ed. Hilarious. The audio quality is kind of... fagotty. You may need to turn up the sound a bit.]
Wednesday, July 2, 2014
Fastest-Growing Metro Area in U.S. Has No Crime or Kids
[ed. Sounds like hell on earth to me. Who'd want to isolate themselves from grandchildren, dogs, young people and families? Different ethnic cultures and businesses? New experiences and new perspectives? A lot of people, apparently. But hey, at least there's no crime (and it's clean!)]
“It’s like an adult Disney World,” Conkle, 77, said of The Villages, Florida, whose expansion has come with virtually no crime, traffic, pollution -- or children.
The mix has attracted flocks of senior citizens, making The Villages the world’s largest retirement community. Its population of 110,000 has more than quadrupled since 2000, U.S. Census Bureau data show. It rose 5.2 percent last year, on par with megacities like Lagos, Nigeria, and Dhaka, Bangladesh.
That the most rapidly expanding U.S. metro area is a Manhattan-sized retirement village -- with more golf carts than New York has taxis -- highlights the transformation of the world’s demographic profile. The over-60 set -- which the United Nations projects will almost triple to 2 billion by 2050 -- offers opportunity to marketers and homebuilders even as it confounds governments that must care for an aging populace.
“A lot of communities see seniors as a huge benefit -- they contribute to the tax base and the local economy,” said William Frey, a demographer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “But these people are going to get older, and they’re going to have health needs and service needs.”
Few have benefited from the spending power of retirees more than H. Gary Morse, who developed The Villages. The Holding Company of the Villages Ltd., owned by Morse and his family, has sold more than 50,000 new homes since 1986, generating $9.9 billion in revenue, according to disclosures in municipal-bond filings.
The Villages, which has rules governing everything from how long children can visit to how many pet fish residents can keep, has helped Morse build a family fortune worth $2.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
In addition to selling homes, Morse, 77, and his family own the local newspaper, a radio station and a television channel.
They also hold a controlling interest in Citizens First Bank, which provides mortgages. The holding company is the landlord of more than 4.5 million square feet of commercial real estate, including dozens of restaurants and retailers.
“They own everything,” said Andrew D. Blechman, author of “Leisureville,” a book about The Villages and other retirement communities that ranks Morse’s as the biggest. “You basically have a city of 100,000 people, owned by a company.”
by Toluse Olorunnipa, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image: Bloomberg
The Power of Two
In the fall of 1966, during a stretch of nine weeks away from the Beatles, John Lennon wrote a song. He was in rural Spain at the time, on the set of a movie called How I Won the War, but the lyrics cast back to an icon of his boyhood in Liverpool: the Strawberry Field children’s home, whose sprawling grounds he’d often explored with his gang and visited with his Aunt Mimi. In late November, the Beatles began work on the song at EMI Studios, on Abbey Road in London. After four weeks and scores of session hours, the band had a final cut of “Strawberry Fields Forever.” That was December 22.
On December 29, Paul McCartney brought in a song that took listeners back to another icon of Liverpool: Penny Lane, a traffic roundabout and popular meeting spot near his home. This sort of call-and-response was no anomaly. He and John, Paul said later, had a habit of “answering” each other’s songs. “He’d write ‘Strawberry Fields,’ ” Paul explained. “I’d go away and write ‘Penny Lane’ … to compete with each other. But it was very friendly competition.”It’s a famous anecdote. Paul, of course, was stressing the collaborative nature of his partnership with John (he went on to note that their competition made them “better and better all the time”). But in this vignette, as in so many from the Beatles years, it’s easy to get distracted by the idea of John and Paul composing independently. The notion that the two need to be understood as individual creators, in fact, has become the contemporary “smart” take on them. “Although most of the songs on any given Beatles album are usually credited to the Lennon-McCartney songwriting team,” Wikipedia declares, “that description is often misleading.” Entries on the site about individual Beatles songs take care to assert their “true” author. Even the superb rock critic Greg Kot once succumbed to this folly. (...)
For centuries, the myth of the lone genius has towered over us, its shadow obscuring the way creative work really gets done. The attempts to pick apart the Lennon-McCartney partnership reveal just how misleading that myth can be, because John and Paul were so obviously more creative as a pair than as individuals, even if at times they appeared to work in opposition to each other. The lone-genius myth prevents us from grappling with a series of paradoxes about creative pairs: that distance doesn’t impede intimacy, and is often a crucial ingredient of it; that competition and collaboration are often entwined. Only when we explore this terrain can we grasp how such pairs as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy all managed to do such creative work. The essence of their achievements, it turns out, was relational. If that seems far-fetched, it’s because our cultural obsession with the individual has obscured the power of the creative pair.
John and Paul epitomize this power. Geoff Emerick—who served as the principal engineer for EMI on Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, some of The White Album, and Abbey Road—recognized from the outset that the two formed a single creative being. “Even from the earliest days,” he wrote in his memoir, Here, There and Everywhere, “I always felt that the artist was John Lennon and Paul McCartney, not the Beatles.”
One reason it's so tempting to try to cleave John and Paul apart is that the distinctions between them were so stark. Observing the pair through the control-room glass at Abbey Road’s Studio Two, Emerick was fascinated by their odd-couple quality:
Paul was meticulous and organized: he always carried a notebook around with him, in which he methodically wrote down lyrics and chord changes in his neat handwriting. In contrast, John seemed to live in chaos: he was constantly searching for scraps of paper that he’d hurriedly scribbled ideas on. Paul was a natural communicator; John couldn’t articulate his ideas well. Paul was the diplomat; John was the agitator. Paul was soft-spoken and almost unfailingly polite; John could be a right loudmouth and quite rude. Paul was willing to put in long hours to get a part right; John was impatient, always ready to move on to the next thing. Paul usually knew exactly what he wanted and would often take offense at criticism; John was much more thick-skinned and was open to hearing what others had to say. In fact, unless he felt especially strongly about something, he was usually amenable to change.The diplomat and the agitator. The neatnik and the whirling dervish. Spending time with Paul and John, one couldn’t help but be struck by these sorts of differences. “John needed Paul’s attention to detail and persistence,” Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife, said. “Paul needed John’s anarchic, lateral thinking.”
by Joshua Wolf Shenk, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Robert Whitaker
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